High Performance Database Development

Posted by Bryan Hinton at Jul 24, 2010 12:13 AM | Permalink

Filed under: PostgreSQL, FreeBSD 8.0, High Performance Web Applications, AOLServer, OpenACS

Fast, High performance, database driven, application architectures that support "true" rapid development are little talked about. AOLServer, OpenACS, PostgreSQL, and TCL are such a combination.

The Atlas detector has seen nine candidates for the top quark - BBC News (bbc.co.uk/news)

I was introduced to AOLServer and OpenACS in 2002 by a close friend who I grew up with. We built a very robust application architecture over the course of the following 6 years.

PostgreSQL was sitting behind the AOLServer/OpenACS instance and AOLServer nicely managed the database connection pools. AOLServer is multi-threaded and internally handles TCL interpretation and execution. TCL makes heavy use of lists (implementation notes aside), so many LISP programmers have enjoyed working with it.

As a precursory introduction to one of the neat functions of how you can rapidly develop and immediately profile complex SQL, I've attached a screen shot of DB data collection (enabled via the developer support toolbar) on a dynamically interpreted page with the developer support toolbar enabled OpenACS 5.6.0 installation sitting on AOLServer 4.5.1, backed by PostgreSQL 8.4.4. As you can see, we are given the name of the exact database pool for each of the 50 or so queries (screen shot only shows one query) along with the duration of the individual SQL command. OpenACS DB data collection